Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Western Arctic CARIBOU herd Down.

Seems like caribou are suffering everywhere....sad.
I hunted the Mulchatna herd when it was going strong.

https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/caribou-are-vanishing-at-an-alarming-rate-is-it-too-late-to-save-them/#:~:text=After%20more%20than%20a%20million,and%20even%20harder%20to%20reverse.

This statement says it all and proves that closing hunting to the roundeyes does NOT affect the population of the herd!…..

“ While local subsistence hunters welcomed the closures, the total number of animals harvested by the non-federally qualified users is relatively small and it’s entirely made up of bulls, so the closures did not affect the population numbers, Joly said.”

While local subsistence hunters welcomed the closures


"Welcomed"..... No, they demanded it - and it had nothing to do with herd dynamics, but that was a handle to hang it on.

Racist and protectionism are ugly words.

I will say, however, that they get little or nothing of monetary value out of the visiting "sport" hunters. No guiding, equipment rentals and very little of anything else.

They get a fair amount of meat donated to them from the outfitters who guide sport hunters. That has ‘monetary’ value in the form of not having to buy meat and not spending money on fuel to go get it themselves.

No, according to them, it is all dumped into the Kotzebue Lagoon as the plane taxis in.....

Well, that did happen once....apparently - I only heard about it - it was before my time there.

I heard from elsewhere that the hunters were weathered in long enough for the meat to spoil.

If so, they did an extremely dumb thing, even tho they technically met the requirement to bring the meat out of the field. I dunno- they may even have been cited for wanton waste. If the meat was spoiled, a LEO should have signed off on it.

Never-the-less, the locals will be using the incident for the next 100 years, or until they get everything they want.

Mine sat in camp 10 days this year on the north slope. It was rarely freezinf. The meat was excellent. My grizzly hide, however, is suspect

I have zero doubt that claim is made all over rural Alaska and the locals use it to their advantage.....
It very well may happen on occasion but I suspect it is very rare, or else the troopers would be all over it...

Guided? May I ask who you went with?

Lol good golly we don’t know why the herd is crashing..


“The thing that stands out the most is that we’ve had a low survival rate of adult females, adult cows,” Joly said. “What is causing that decline or lower survival rates of cows, we just don’t know. We are looking into different factors.”

F&G comes up with goofy reg changes like they did on the slope 10 years ago, hunters galore, air taxis galore, herd crashes... F&G can't figure it out, so they get federal money to research what happened.... that appears to be their modis operandi to coming up with money.

Well, there is this also- From the time rut starts, until April or May, most native hunters will only shoot cows. The bulls are skinny- they want fat cows. Which of course are all pregnant, if they haven't been run too much via snow machine to the point they abort. Even if they don't, the calves that are born are likely to have been impacted, leading to lower survival rates.

But don't discount weather and habitat change, forage degradation or heavy browsing.

I had a gal argue with me she was native from kotzebue she said the pipeline changed to migration into kotzebue. Her grandpa talked how caribou would come through kotzebue. But the pipeline changed that. I told her the WACH herd doesn’t go anywhere near the pipeline and that herd is the CACH. She said don’t care what herd it is their more caribou in kotzebue because of the pipeline. I’m like wtf

I seen videos of the native just wearing out caribou from a boat as they cross the river. I mean just wearing them out.. now they are bitching. Sean Parnell had a plan to connect western Alaska to the road system. But the fake NG story ended that when he lost. Mike Dunleavy needs to move forward and put a road in to nome at least.

When we first opened Sportsman's in Anchorage I had an older Native man come in and was talking with him. He told me that he didn't like AR15's because "by the time you run out of ammo, there's too many caribou floating down river and you can't round them all up"
I just shook my head.

Oh come on now, the natives are the true conservationists…

DIY.

couldn't get through the ,Alatna with fog

I thoroughly enjoyed my self guided Mulchatna Caribou hunts.

Wouldn't one call that lazy stupidity? The opportunity to guide, rent etc.. is there for all to give a go at.

nothing is life is guaranteed and you certainly have to change as you go along or you are behind...

I despise roads. LOL. But I really do. They just make the world a smaller place every single time.

Too many dang people populate the planet unfortunately and they demand access to everything the easiest way possible.